[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  On that happy note, she hung up.

  Lindy had done her thinking. She’d also acted, so fast that I had no idea of what was going on until it was out there for everyone to see. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the article in the local Las Vegas daily newspaper the next day.

  Andie Appleton’s search for the man of her dreams has taken a nasty and potentially dangerous twist. The lovestruck Irishwoman who has been looking for Leon, a man from Arizona that she met on holidays, for the past few weeks has been receiving hate mail that warns her to stay away from Leon – or face the consequences.

  “Andie’s received both physical mail and email from this person, cautioning her that she must stay away from Leon. The mails would send a shiver down your spine,” says a source.

  Our source has also informed us that the police have been notified. “We’re in the process of passing on all information, physical and virtual, to the police.” As for the future of Andie’s search, our source says it’s business as usual. “It’s going to take more than one psycho to scare Andie off. She has lots of new ideas to help her find Leon, so watch this space.”

  Trust Lindy to wring the maximum amount of exposure from this – and not to even tell me! Especially after the People Search lack-of-communication fiasco! It was exactly her style.

  I picked up the phone to ring her and tear strips off her, but it instantly went to voicemail. I threw the phone on the bed and sighed. Even if I got through to her, she would be so utterly unrepentant that I’d get no satisfaction from her anyway. The whole thing was infuriating.

  The hotel phone rang. I picked it up reluctantly.

  “Hello?”

  “Morning. I just read the evening paper, and it says –”

  “I know, Colm, I know.”

  “Has Lindy been eating magic mushrooms again, or do we need to take out insurance on your life?”

  “Lindy doesn’t eat – surely you know that by now. But there is some basis to the story, albeit a highly exaggerated one.” I briefly filled Colm in.

  “I wish you’d told me,” he said when I’d finished. “I can’t imagine it felt great to be told Leon doesn’t want anything to do with you. I’m sure you probably wanted to talk about it with someone.”

  His concern confused me. Yesterday, he’d been grumping and grouching at me, but now he was all worried about me! I said nothing, hoping he’d change the subject, but there was nothing but silence on the end of the line as if he was expecting me to say something else.

  I didn’t think I could stand going over the possibility of Leon being behind the mails again. I’d spent hours tossing and turning the previous night, wondering if I really was making a fool of myself and if I should call the whole thing off – or if I even could. I just felt like a bit player in the whole Looking for Leon juggernaut at this point. There was no way Isolde or Éire TV would let this go until they’d got everything they wanted out of it, and of course there was LVTV to consider as well. The whole thing was a mess that I’d never be able to clean up.

  When Colm still seemed to be waiting for an answer, I decided to blame Germaine rather than getting into the ins and outs of who it could potentially be.

  “Well, if it’s her, she’ll hopefully stop now that she’s been exposed,” Colm said when I finished speaking. “She, or he. Imagine if Leon turned out to be gay! Germaine can be a boy’s name as well!”

  “Oh, stop it! I never even considered that!” I chuckled. “We never actually even kissed, you know . . . oh God . . . now you have me worried!”

  “Come on, admit it – it would be a brilliant twist to the story!”

  “Well, it would certainly explain why he hasn’t come out of the woodwork yet!” The more I thought about it, the more hilarious it was . . . this whole situation had been surreal from day one, and at this stage nothing would surprise me. I started to laugh, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Colm joined in on the other end of the line.

  “I’m kinda relieved you found that funny – the minute it was out of my mouth, I said to myself that you’d probably eat the head off me!”

  “What kind of an ogre do you think I am? Being grumpy is your job, not mine!”

  “Okay, point taken – but I’m working on that, as they say over here.”

  “Ahem. Sure, Colm. Whatever you say.”

  “Listen, let me prove it to you. What are you doing this evening?”

  “Trying to stop myself from hunting Lindy down and strangling her. Apart from that, there’s nothing on the agenda.”

  “Well, there is now. Meet me in the lobby in ten minutes.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Three hours later, I was sipping a tequila and feeling more relaxed than I’d felt in a very long time. I’d decided I liked the new, being-worked-on Colm a lot, lot more than the old one. If this was what getting sick did to him, then I was going to put a laxative into his food later – his illness had definitely marked a turning point in his attitude, even if yesterday had been something of a bump on the road. So far, neither of us had alluded to the conversation we’d had the last time we’d met face to face and, as the day was going so well, I was in no rush to do so either.

  When I’d gone down to the lobby to meet him, he was at the reception desk. It looked like he was buying something.

  “What’s going on?” I said when he ambled over to me.

  He tapped his nose, and beckoned for me to walk with him out of the lobby and onto the Strip. Once we hit the street, he led the way towards a waiting bus. I peered at the writing at the front of the bus.

  “Las Vegas Helicopter Night Flight Transfer Bus? We’re going on a helicopter?”

  “You really don’t miss much, do you?” He roared laughing. “You sound like a kid!”

  We got on the bus before I could say anything else.

  “I don’t know about you, but this is something I’ve wanted to do since we first got here,” Colm said.

  Twenty minutes later, the bus dropped us off at the helicopter terminal at McCarran Airport. Colm and I boarded a helicopter along with four others, a couple with two teenage children. We were handed glasses of champagne as soon as we were seated – even the teenagers, but their parents soon whipped them out of the hands of their children and into their own. I browsed the information leaflet I’d been given with my champagne. We would be going on a twelve-to-fifteen minute ride over the Strip and downtown, which promised ‘spectacular’ and ‘mesmerising’ views. I’m usually quite wary when I see those words, but for once the reality lived up to the promise. Vegas by helicopter at night was absolutely something else, primarily because all of the hotels were so distinctive. I could have recited the sequence of the hotels on the Strip from north to south in my sleep at this stage, but seeing them from this new perspective shook up my mental roadmap. I felt the thrill of seeing it all new again as the helicopter flew from the southern end of the Strip to the northern, just like when I landed in McCarran Airport for the first time and caught my first glimpse of the lights of the Strip. When we reached the Stratosphere, the helicopter dipped lower and began to circle the tower, then moved on to the glittering lights of the downtown area.

  It would be a bad pun to say that those fifteen minutes flew, but honestly I couldn’t believe how fast they went by. I had been so agog at the sights that I’d only taken a few sips of my glass of champagne, which was unheard of for me – I’d originally intended to drink Colm’s too (if the parents in the family accompanying us didn’t snap it out of his hands first, of course). All too soon, we were back in McCarran Airport and preparing to disembark.

  “I’m so glad we did that,” I said to Colm on the bus on the way back to the hotel. “When you wanted to meet up, I thought you were going to suggest going to a show, and I wasn’t really in the mood for that.”

  Vegas was a city that bombarded you with advertisements for the bigger shows that had the budget to flash their ads up and down the Strip, and almost subliminally made you think you want
ed to go to them just because you saw ads for them so often.

  “Neither was I,” said Colm. “The helicopter ride was amazing.”

  “Are you on a high after it? Sorry, I’m having a bad-pun night in my head. Don’t mind me. It was amazing alright. It felt like it all happened too fast, though! I don’t want the night to end yet!”

  “Who says it’s going to?”

  The bus stopped at the MGM and I stood up to get off, but Colm caught the belt on the back of my cotton sundress and pulled me back down with it. “We’re staying on for a while.”

  “Where are we off to now?”

  “You know there’s no point in asking, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. For once, I didn’t mind not knowing. His last surprise had turned out to be a very good one.

  We travelled down the Strip as far as the Venetian Hotel, then hopped out. Colm swept inside and went into full-scale organising mode, and within five minutes, we were sitting in a private two-passenger Venetian gondola, floating down the hotel’s Grand Canal. I’d lost count of how many times I’d languished on the bridge overlooking the gondoliers serenading their charges in the gondola, making vague plans in my head to organise a gondola ride some day. Colm didn’t know this, though. The gondolier sang his heart out to us, looking pained and joyful in equal measure. We drifted under a large arch as he sang, then on past a café and eventually past the bridge I’d supported myself on many times while idly daydreaming. There was something hugely romantic about the setting, and at some stage it hit me that all of this felt a bit like a date, but I put that thought out of my mind – that one was just too weird to grapple with on a lovely night like tonight.

  When the ride ended, Colm suggested a drink in the bar in the Venetian. I saw absolutely no reason to say no – I rarely do when there’s drink involved – so we made our way into the V Bar. I could see by Colm’s face as soon as he walked in that he regretted his suggestion – the bar was uber-trendy and chic, and really not his type of place at all.

  I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt and turned on my heel, dragging him along with me.

  “What’s the story?”

  “You know there’s no point in asking, don’t you?”

  “Touché.”

  We walked back onto the Strip, where I instantly hailed a taxi. We bustled in, and I gave the driver an address I’d memorised a few days before when I’d remembered the promise I’d made to Colm to coax him into staying at the MGM. It hadn’t been important to me before to uphold it. That had changed.

  “What’s there?”

  “Something you’ll like,” I said. “It’s time for me to do something for you now.”

  Five minutes later, we arrived. I saw the shop I was looking for on the right-hand side of the street.

  “Pull up in front of that costume shop, please.”

  A woman with a showgirl costume paraded the street outside the shop, and waved into the car with glee when she realised that we were potential customers. I filled the driver’s palm with money, and we got out and made our way into the shop, escorted by our new showgirl friend.

  “Hello, we’re looking for 70s outfits,” I said to the man in a gangster suit who came to attend to us.

  “Hey, that’s great!” The man looked Colm up and down, and it was so obvious that he was thinking that one of us had a 70s outfit already, but there was no way he would risk losing our business by saying any such thing. Good move, with someone as volatile as Colm around. “Follow me!”

  Half an hour later I was decked out in a lime-green trouser suit, complete with huge bellbottoms and matching lime-green platforms. Colm was sporting a pair of canary-yellow trousers, a red and yellow shirt with swirly designs that reminded me of the carpet in Topple Town, and a bright red jacket. Of course, Colm was in his element, but I hadn’t expected how much I’d enjoy browsing through the rails of miniskirts, tank tops and swingy dresses myself.

  “Right, let’s go,” I said.

  Colm didn’t ask where – he’d given up inquiring. A couple of minutes later, we were in another taxi. As soon as I gave the driver the name of the street I wanted to go to, Colm’s face lit up.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know what’s on that street.”

  “Oh, do you, now? Yes, I’ve wanted to go to bingo over here since the night we arrived. I hope you’re ready for a night with the grannies.”

  Colm’s smile screamed, ‘Yeah, right!’ He had my game well and truly busted – but I didn’t care. His expression more than made up for any lack of surprise when we pulled up outside the 70s disco. I wasn’t surprised he knew where we were going just from hearing the address – this was the biggest 70s club in Vegas. The only thing I was surprised about was that he hadn’t gone there sooner. Then again, maybe he had – I wasn’t his keeper, but it just seemed like we’d been hanging out pretty much every night since we got here.

  The nightclub was exactly what I’d expected – non-stop 70s tunes. Everyone was decked out in 70s garb, but none of the finery was quite so impressively outlandish as ours, which surprised me – we were in Vegas, for God’s sake! Of course, this only served to send Colm’s happiness-rating through the roof.

  “This has turned out to be one hell of a day,” he said. “And I thought we couldn’t top yesterday!”

  “It beats sitting in my room painting my toenails, that’s for sure.”

  “I’d imagine it does. And if we keep ourselves busy like this for long enough, we’ll never have to talk about how yesterday ended, will we?”

  I raised my eyebrows, then we both started to smile.

  “I’m shocked you haven’t brought it up already,” he went on. “I thought it would be the first thing you’d say when we met earlier . . . it’s not like you not to tackle something head on.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you don’t know me very well.”

  “Oh, come on. Ever since we came to Vegas, you’ve been running around getting this, that and the other sorted, or confronting someone about something. What’s different about this?”

  What could I say? This is different because I decided to cut you some slack after what you’ve been through?

  “You weren’t comfortable with what I asked you about, and that’s fine. You don’t have to explain yourself if you don’t want to.”

  “Well, maybe I want to.” He pointed to a chill-out room, where people were sprawled about on blow-up sofas and sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Let’s go in here.”

  We found two free gigantic green-and-purple beanbags, and plonked ourselves on them. The beans moulded around my entire body, and I instantly felt more at ease. Colm’s beans obviously weren’t magic, as he looked anything but relaxed.

  “It was wrong of me to say you ruined yesterday by asking me that question about who I really am. You just took me by surprise, that’s all. Okay, it’s just a question, but it’s a pretty fundamental one, when you think about it.”

  “Are you going to get all deep on me, Colm Cannon?” I laughed a fake laugh that didn’t sound convincing even to me. “Look, it’s fine,” I said, trying to give him a get-out alley. Intrigued as I was about him and his circumstances, it was hard to watch him struggling with explaining where he was coming from. Besides, I knew what it was like to be stuck in a cul-de-sac you couldn’t get out of . . . “You don’t have to say anything else.”

  “No, really, I do.” He looked down at his hands, then looked up and stared right into my eyes. “I know people think I’m distant. I’ve lost count of how many times people have told me I come across as arrogant – you weren’t the first, and you won’t be the last. But that’s just how I seem to present myself to the world. That’s not me.”

  Okay, he’d had his chance to get out of this conversation. He’d chosen not to, so it was time for the questions.

  “So why do you project that image of yourself, in that case?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not consciously trying to. That just seems to be how people see me. I’
m fairly confident in most areas of life, and I’m not afraid to pull someone up on something if they’re in the wrong. That’s often interpreted as arrogance. If that’s how things are, then fine. I’m not bothered about what most people think. It would only worry me if people whose opinions I cared about thought that about me.”

  I left the implications of what he was saying unaddressed. I didn’t want to get involved in a ‘Does that mean you care about what I think?’ conversation. That would just be too weird. And yet, if he did, I would be glad. I was starting to care about what he thought, too.

  “You can do something about being distant, though,” I said. “If you’re removed from situations, that’s because you choose to be.”

  “That’s a force of habit, I suppose. Plus I have only-child syndrome – I keep to myself by nature.” He ripped the label off his bottle of alcohol-free beer, then put the bottle down and looked over at me as I digested this only-child notion. “I’m just telling you this to try to explain why your question threw me. When you asked me which version of me was real, I was annoyed, but not at you. I just don’t think anyone has seen me for who I really am for a very long time, if ever – and that’s what annoyed me. I just hope it will happen some day.”

  “Of course it will . . .”

  He shook his head. “Not necessarily. It certainly hasn’t so far.”

  “Well, maybe it’s just around the corner for you.”

  “So is a Lotto win.” He gave me a rueful smile. “Anyway, I hope that explains to some extent why I said what I said yesterday.”

  I nodded slowly. “It explains a lot.”

  “Plus, I was in a shitty mood because I didn’t want what was a great day to have to end at all. But hey, today’s turned out pretty well too.” He shook his empty alcohol-free beer bottle. “Anyway, enough serious talk. I’ll get us more drinks.”